Surprise! Not every licensor associated with Farewell to Yamato had a Japanese name! The actual Pepsi Corporation took a step into anime tie-ins with free prizes that gave fans a lot to chase down. Pepsi’s Yamato campaign seems to have lasted well past 1978, since it incorporated Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, an anime series produced by Yoshinobu Nishizaki that aired in 1980.

Shitajiki is the Japanese term for “pencil board.” If you had a pad of paper that lacked sufficient backing, you’d slide one of these babies into it and you were all set. Pepsi released nine of these, all of which are shown below…

Note books

Pepsi also offered note books, all with blank paper sandwiched between double covers.

And finally, keychain mascots and a wraparound book cover to beautify your school notebook, or whatever.

Description by O.G. Superfan Toshihiro Watanabe:

During the Yamato boom of the 1970s, Pepsi-Cola seemed to be more popular than Coca-Cola in Japan, but my research reveals that it was actually struggling. Two years prior to this campaign, Itochu Corporation withdrew from the business, and sales in the Kanto region were taken over by Pepsi-Cola Sales, a direct operation of PepsiCo, while sales in the Kansai region were handled by 7-Up beverages. Currently, Suntori Foods handles sales.

The reason this giveaway campaign was held when Farewell was released is probably because they were struggling. Bottles were still the norm, not cans, and you could tell if you’ve gotten a good or bad bottle by peeling back the rubber on the underside of the crown cap.

The first poster boasts a generous offer of a cash prize of up to ¥1000. Of course, the chances of winning ¥1000 were extremely low. After all, each ticket only cost about ¥50. The prize amounts for items other than the pencil board have decreased, and there’s also an option to give away an extra item, so the order of the promotions is unclear, but it seems like they’ve been doing a lot of trial and error.

The longest running promotions were probably the pencil boards and cash prize offers. Aside from revisions to the prize amounts, the eight types of pencil boards offered as prizes actually changed slightly along the way. As can be seen on these posters, there are two different designs for Teresa – one in an anime style, and one in an illustration style, and two different design designs for Kodai, Yuuki, and Yamato: one vertical and one horizontal. Furthermore, two versions have been confirmed: one with the Pepsi logo on the front and one on the back.

(The “timetable holders” were keychains attached to plastic day planners)

The second round of gifts offered a free notebook and a timetable keychain. The free notebook was a plain B5 sized sketch pad (in four styles), but it was surprisingly thick. There’s no way of knowing if anyone actually won a lot of prizes. After all, it doesn’t say there are no losing tickets.

(Five different Yamato book covers and four from Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird)

The final gift was a book cover. The presence of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird suggests it’s from a 1980 campaign, but the poster design consistently used the Farewell theme.

The duration of each gift campaign is unknown, but since it continued around until around the time of Blue Bird – though probably not without interruption – it has thought to have lasted for about a year and a half.

I tried to deduce the giveaway period, Which I mentioned was unknown. The pencil boards were made between the summer and the end of 1978. The notebook and keychain were probably made to coincide with the start of this new school year, spring to summer of 1979. Finally, if it was timed to coincide with the broadcast of Blue Bird, it would have been around the beginning of 1980. This is purely speculation, there is no evidence for it.

One thing I find considerate about this gift campaign is that it clearly states the total number of items, so the goal was clear. Did fans who wanted to complete their collection by a whole case of 24 bottles and drink them all?

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